Urban Planning According to Arcade Fire

If you’re an interior designer, architect, urban planner, or hippie environmentalist, you have heard endless discussion about suburban sprawl.  This will not be a new or surprising topic for you, but you WILL be expected to gravely nod your head while I talk about it (that way everyone who sees you will know you’re already clued in).  It occurred to me that other people might notice the patterns of negativity in suburbia when I heard the song “Sprawl II: Mountains Beyond Mountains” by the Canadian band Arcade Fire (and if you haven’t heard them, stop wasting your life and give them a listen right now.  You’re welcome.).  Part of the chorus goes:

Cause on the surface the city lights shine,
They're calling at me, "come and find your kind."

Sometimes I wonder if the world's so small,
That we can never get away from the sprawl,
Living in the sprawl,
Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains,

And there’s no end in sight.

Now, let me be clear about a few things:

1. All teenagers hate growing up in suburbs, and resent their parents for being so lame that they chose to live there.  This does not a legit argument against suburbs make.
2. Many wonderful articles have already been written on suburbia and the vacuity of culture that results from a place not defined by its physical location.  I wish I could just compile a list of these great articles and force you to read them, but alas, you probably have a life.
3. I would never contend that no good can come of the suburb.  It simply annoys me that the positives are assumed absolute truths and not just considered design failings of urban areas.  Frankly, everything that a suburb offers, such as green space, safe play areas for children, and convenient transportation, SHOULD be available in a well-designed city.  Buy why spend the money on an efficient, well-designed urban center everyone can enjoy when you can lazily plop down box buildings wherever in a suburb?

(image from www.city-data.com)

What I would really like to point out is the visual that these song lyrics invoke: an endless landscape of dying buildings, a void of life, beige monuments representing nothing.  It always makes you sad to see an underused strip mall or empty box store, but those are actually quite creepy structures, like an empty shell of a dead crustacean.  What’s more is that these lonely outposts of commerce are always surrounded by what seems like dozens of square miles of unused parking lot, which only adds to the visual blankness.

I suppose my goal here is to give Arcade Fire props for seeing this and giving me a metaphor I can use in later discussions around suburbia.  The mountain ranges of design-less architecture that exist in the world do everyone a disservice, even while promising convenience. 

We deserve better buildings, a better daily experience of our world, and have settled for mass-produced cinderblock and asphalt.  Shame on developers for pushing it, and shame on us for accepting it.

--Becky